A blip or something worse

[Gordon]

Greetings,

Thanks for the opportunity to post my thoughts here and get some feedback. I don’t know if anyone will have any answers or maybe it’s just something I have to go through.

Where to begin? I’ll begin with a little about me and then describe the situation I find myself in at the moment and work back from there.

I am 40 year old male who is self employed. I live with my partner and we have the most beautiful 2 year old boy in the world!!! (In my humble opinion.) I love my other half to bits and she is one of the kindest, supportive, selfless and sensitive people I have every met. We have been together now for 4 years.

My business is computer training, for which I have had for just over 4 years also. The problem with it, is that it is very seasonal and we are fast approaching Christmas and my order book this year has dried up faster than previous years. My problem is that I have now personally run out of money. No one does training over Christmas (or even summer for that reason).

I have been working with a chap to develop a longer term strategy to alleviate this problem and that is coming on just fine. Utlilising goal setting, vision boards, mind persuasion techniques, along with copywriting skills for our marketing. We are seeing some results and one of my goals to concentrate of several corporate clients to generate monthly income streams instead of peaks and troughs of revenues.

It has been a hard slog to even get to this point and to cut a long story short. I have now not been able to pay myself properly recently. As a consequence is for the first time ever we have not been able to pay our mortgage!! My other has quite understandably been upset and has blamed me for everything under the sun….and has only started talking to me again after two days….her family have always thought of me as trash at the best of times….(they think everyone is trash, by the way!!)

I have been trying to look for some temp work, just to ease the cash flow and relieve the financial pressure. On top of everyone hating me, chasing me for money, thinking me as trash, I also have to deal with the guilt and responsibility of it all. No luck on the temp front….nearly single again…and hate not being able to afford to take my son out.

This is a short version of what is going on….I know that in the long term we will be fine….but it’s not easy when your in the middle of it.

I don’t know how to sort our the short term….or do I try to keep focused on the longer term picture to resolves the issues?

Regards,

[Mycroft]

It sounds like you have a severe communications problem between you and your "partner".

What you should do is have a sit down with her and tell her exactly what's going on. Tell her how much you screwed up by thinking you would be able to solve the problem on your own and not letting her in on what was going on until it was too late.

You thought you could go it alone and it turned out that you couldn't. It happens to most of us. Ask her if she would be willing to help. You are partners, yes? If she asks how she can help, tell her the thruth - that you don't know, but two minds going over the whole situation and the options for getting out of it would be much better than one.

If she says something to the effect of "you got us into this mess, now you get us out". Well, other than counseling, I don't know what to say.

As for money, there are a LOT of holiday jobs out there. Find at least two of them to do until after the new year. Put the training business on hiatus until January 8.

For marketing to get some real business after that, some great books are:

"No BS Sales Success" Dan Kennedy (Plus all his other books eventually)
and anything by Zig Zigler.

As for future plans. You and your partner(s) need to do some mindstorming. One idea; pack your schedule/raise rates during the up-time and use the down-time to bone up on your skills, take a breather.

[Brutha]

My business is computer training, for which I have had for just over 4 years also. The problem with it, is that it is very seasonal and we are fast approaching Christmas and my order book this year has dried up faster than previous years. My problem is that I have now personally run out of money. No one does training over Christmas (or even summer for that reason).

Perhaps you should try to market "computer training for the elderly" as Christmas Gift with some kind of discount?

I don't really understand why Christmas should be a bad season for you.